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Harvard Law School Is a Good Start

Why does everyone try to paint Barack Obama with their personal brush? Hawaiian? Urban? Community organizer? Smoker? Ivy league education? Single mom? He's your man. That strikes me as a setup for disappointment; the discovery that he may not share your values (e.g., on puppies or atheism) might lead to the conclusion that he may not be your President after all. Or maybe I'm off on a pessimistic deep read.

I bring it up in light of an editorial in Saturday's NYT, which draws inferences about Obama from the author's own Harvard law education. My experience has been that people from Harvard love to say "Harvard" (with notable exceptions -- you know who you are) but if you delete the H-word from the piece, so that instead it says 'Law School,' the remainder fairly describes part of what every law school is about, and why it's a good place for a President to have been:

Far from being a place for feeling exceptional, my Harvard Law [school] was a place for feeling strangely ordinary. Inside the Ivy League, an Ivy League pedigree makes one precisely as distinctive as being Chinese in Shanghai. The means of distinguishing oneself become progressively scarce and difficult.

. . . .

If the domineering, humiliating Kingsfields of movies like ?The Paper Chase? ever existed, they were no longer much in evidence by the time I got to Cambridge, Mass., in 1983. The faculty had largely adopted a no-hassle policy. Didn?t do the reading? Just say so; no hard feelings. Yet their almost exaggerated gentleness didn?t make things easier. Rather, our professors taught us to take sole responsibility for our own failings. Called on to state a case in class, but don?t feel you can do it? Go ahead, pass; but the word ?pass? will burn in your throat.

Our future president probably also discovered, as I did, that wonderful community known as the law school study group, where overworked students divide responsibility for portions of a syllabus and then pool their notes and interpretations. Foxhole alliances rapidly form. Out of necessity, you learn to trust. Out of honor, you make your work trustworthy. One may stand or fall on one?s own merits, but the wise do not try to stand alone.

If all excerpt above is an expanded version of the proposition that law school likely gave Obama an education and a certain kind of social experience, I agree. I think every law school offers opportunities for both, not just the Boalts and Harvards. But it isn't all peaches and cream.  Consider for a moment whether the author could pull off a similar analogy on Biden's behalf.

Full post as published by Nuts & Boalts on January 18, 2009 (boomark / email).